THESys/ Inaugural Lecture by Prof. Klaus Eisenack, 23 April 2018

In his Lecture, Klaus Eisenack raises the question, if there are new archetypes of environmental cooperation.
We are looking back to decades where pressing environmental problems like resource overexploitation and climate change have been already well-known. We are standing, today, on the shoulders of giants in scholarship on sustainability. Yet, the problems have not sufficiently been resolved. At the same time, distant actors around the globe increasingly cooperate to find new solutions, policy instruments or institutions. For understanding success or failure, the devil is likely in the details. The lecture will report four studies with alternative perspectives on climate protection and adaption to the impacts of climate change, and will sketch the research agenda of the Resource Economics Group. The first study is on adaption to cooling water scarcity for power plants under climate change. The second provides an overview on barriers to institutional adaptation in river basin management. The third study investigates the strategic interdependence of adaption and climate protection in the international arena, and the last focuses on incentives for fossil fuel owners to promote climate policies. The lecture concludes by arguing that a comprehensive understanding of new patterns of cooperation and their barriers requires specific attention to the governance of path dependence. This can be studied with games and with novel approaches to comparative and interdisciplinary case studies, for example “Archetype Analysis”.
Prof. Dr. rer. nat Klaus Eisenack is Professor for Resource Economics at the Faculty of Life Sciences at the Albrecht Daniel Thaer-Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences. He completed his doctoral dissertation in Mathematics in 2006 at Free University in Berlin and became Professor in Environment and Development Economics and later Resource Economics at the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. Klaus Eisenack has been a member at IRI THESys since 2016. He is a steering committee member of the “Berlin Workshop in Institutional Analysis of Social-Ecological Systems“ (WINS) and together with his staff he organizes many of the WINS activities at IRI THESys.
The lecture was a cooperation between the Thaer-Institute, the Friends of Agriculture and Horticulture at HU Berlin and IRI THESys.